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Global warming 'will hurt Russia'

3 October 2003

By Fred Pearce

A failure by Russia to sign up to the Kyoto Protocol would risk unleashing dangerous climatic changes at home, two of the country’s top climate scientists have warned. The caution came during a conference on global warming in Moscow that ends on Friday.

Valentin Meleshko, of the Central Geophysical Observatory, forecast droughts in European Russia, dead pine forests across the taiga, and buckled roads, flooded rivers and broken pipelines in Siberia as permafrost melted. And recent disastrous floods in Yakutia were blamed on global climate change by Alexander Bedritsky, head of Russia’s Federal Hydrometeorological Service.

The 1997 Kyoto protocol to combat climate change will only come into legal force when countries responsible for more that 55 per cent of rich nation’s greenhouse gas emissions have ratified it in their parliaments. Ratifications now cover 44 per cent; Russia would add 17 per cent and hence activate the protocol.

This week’s conference seemed like the perfect occasion for President Vladimir Putin to announce that he was putting the protocol before his parliament. But instead he told delegates he had not yet decided whether to propose ratification.

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Putin pointed out that “an increase of two or three degrees wouldn’t be so bad for a northern country like Russia. We could spend less on fur coats, and the grain harvest would go up”.

Pollution permits

Delegates took this as a joke. But some of his scientists make the argument seriously, although others believe the grain harvest would suffer. His economic advisers, headed by Andrei Illarionov, argue that Russian might gain from global warming.

In 2002 year ago, prime minister Mikhail Kasyanov told the Johannesburg World Summit that Russia would ratify the protocol “soon”. And until recently, most observers believed it would happen – if only so Russian could sell “spare” pollution permits under the protocol’s complex rules for carbon trading.

Russian emissions of greenhouse gases are currently around 30 per cent below its Kyoto targets for 2010, because of its economic collapse since 1989. “We can earn say one billion dollars a year if we trade our carbon dioxide quota,” said Aleksei Yablokov, a former environmental adviser to Mikhail Gorbachev.

But Putin’s economic advisers argue that his plans to double the country’s GDP within a decade will send emissions soaring, eventually leaving no spare permits. Putin told the conference on Friday that ratifying the protocol would have only short-term economic benefits for Russia.

The economic advisers also fear a functioning international protocol could undermine world demand for oil – at a time when Russia has just signed deals with Western oil companies to develop its huge reserves on the island of Sakhalin.

Some observers believe that Putin’s indecision represents brinkmanship, and that Russia will eventually sign up – at a price. If Russia does not, the Kyoto protocol will be dead, as the US, with 36 per cent of emissions has said it will not sign.